The external expectations of organizational accountability force organizational leaders to find solutions and answers in organizational (and information) governance to assuage the feelings of doubt and unease about the behaviour of the organization and its employees that continuously seem to be expressed in the organizational environment. Organizational leaders have to align the interests of their share– and stakeholders in finding a balance between performance and accountability, individual and collective ethical approaches, and business ethics based on compliance, based on integrity, or both. They have to integrate accountability in organizational governance based on a strategy that defines boundaries for rules and routines. They need to define authority structures and find ways to control the behaviour of their employees, without being very restrictive and coercive. They have to implement accountability structures in organizational interactions that are extremely complex, nonlinear, and dynamic, in which (mostly informal) relational networks of employees traverse formal structures. Formal processes, rules, and regulations, used for control and compliance, cannot handle such environments, continuously in ‘social flux’, unpredictable, unstable, and (largely) unmanageable. It is a challenging task that asks exceptional management skills from organizational leaders. The external expectations of accountability cannot be neglected, even if it is not always clear what is exactly meant with that concept. Why is this (very old) concept still of importance for modern organizations?In this book, organizational governance, information governance, and accountability are the core subjects, just like the relationship between them. A framework is presented of twelve manifestations of organizational accountability the every organization had to deal with. An approach is introduced for strategically govern organizational accountability with three components: behaviour, accountability, and external assessments. The core propositions in this book are that without paying strategic attention to the behaviour of employees and managers and to information governance and management, it will be extremely difficult for organizational leaders to find a balance between the two objectives of organizational governance: performance and accountability.
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The vast literature on accountability in the public sector (usually called ‘public accountability’originating from political science and public administration tends to emphasize the positive dimension of holding authorities to account. As formulated by one prominent scholar in the field, ‘[a]ccountability has become an icon for good governance’: it is perceived as ‘a Good Thing, and, so it seems, we can’t have enough of it’ (Bovens, 2005: 182, 183). Accountability has, thus, become one of the central values of democratic rule – varying on a well-known American slogan one could phrase this as ‘no public responsi bility without accountability’.
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News media in The Netherlands show great variety in the extent and ways, in which they realize media accountability online in terms of actor transparency, product transparency and feedback opportunities online. It is suggested that even those news rooms that seem to adhere to transparency and public accountability still need to explore the functionality and application of media accountability instruments (MAI). Both in terms of potentials and pitfalls, news rooms need to consider about what they want to be transparent and in what ways. To the extent that online innovations are visible, traditional news media seem to experiment, as is the case with newsroom blogs or the project of hyper local journalism Dichtbij.nl, part of the Telegraaf Company. Various news media have on-going projects on audience participation, online applications and distribution models. However, since many projects merely aim at finding new applications, processes, platforms and business models, it remains to be seen assess whether projects are indeed reasonably innovative and feasible at the same time. The development of an online and therefore immediate, archived, personalized and interactive context, offers practical and ethical challenges to Dutch journalism. These challenges bring shifts in its role and responsibility to society. It means that changes occur in what journalists are accountable for, as well as ways in how they are accountable. The Dutch media landscape lodges various professional accountability instruments like the press council and both profession-wide and news media specific codes of ethics, but some of these instruments receive only moderate support. Proactive openness is more an exception than the rule and may well be a distinctive indicator for quality journalism. Although news media often acknowledge the importance of media accountability offline and online, they often lack the resources or courage to use them or have different priorities. This ambiguous position may indicate that in relation to media accountability online, Dutch news media are between hope and fear: that it will either improve their relationship with the public and fuel professional quality, or ask too much of resources with too little benefit.
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This chapter offers a working definition of social accountability as any citizen-led action beyond elections that aims to enhance the accountability of state actors. We view social accountability as a broad array of predominantly bottom-up initiatives, aimed at improving the quality of governance (especially oversight and responsiveness) through active citizen participation. We also trace the evolution of SA as a concept in the literature over the past decades and, then, discuss some influential theoretic approaches to SAIs, pointing out strengths and weaknesses of each model. Finally, we suggest organising Arab SAIs into one of three categories: (1) transparency; (2) advocacy; or (3) participatory governance and we review each of these existing action formats by discussing their main strengths and flaws.
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Many organizations have undergone substantial reorganization in the last decade. They re-engineered their business processes and exchanged proprietary, not integrated applications for more standard solutions. Integration of structured data in relational data bases has improved documentation of business transactions and increased data quality. But almost 90% of the information that organizations manage is unstructured, can not easily be integrated into a traditional database. Just like structured data, unstructured information in organizations are records, meant and used as evidence for organizational actions and transactions. Governments, courts and other stakeholders are making increasing demands for the trustworthiness of records. This is part of a long-term trend toward defining what accountability means in a digital era. An analysis of literature of information science, organization science and archival science illustrates that for accountability, reconstruction of the past is essential. Hypothesis of this paper is that for the reconstruction of the past each organization needs (at least) a combination of three mechanisms: enterprise records management, organizational memory and records auditing. Enterprise records management ensures that records meet the for accountability necessary quality requirements: integrity, authenticity, controllability and historicity. These requirements ensure records that can be trusted. Trusted records enhance the possibility of reconstructing the past. The organizational memory ensures that trusted records are preserved for as long as is necessary to comply to accountability regulations. It provides an information and communication technology infrastructure to (indefinitely) store those records and to keep them accessible. Records auditing audits enterprise records management and organizational memory to assess the possibility to reconstruct past organizational actions and transactions. These mechanisms ensure that organizations have a documented understanding of: the processing of actions and transactions within business processes; the dissemination of trusted records; the way the organization accounts for the actions and transactions within its business processes; and the reconstruction of actions and transactions from business processes over time. This understanding is important for the reconstruction of the past in digitized organizations and improve organizational accountability.
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Many organizations have undergone substantial reorganization in the last decade. They re-engineered their business processes and exchanged proprietary, not integrated applications for more standard solutions. Integration of structured data in relational databases has improved documentation of business transactions and increased data quality. But almost 90% of the information that organizations manage is unstructured, cannot easily be integrated into a traditional database. When used for organizational actions and transactions, structured and unstructured information are records. They are meant and used as evidence. Governments, courts and other stakeholders are making increasing demands for the trustworthiness of records. An analysis of literature of the information, organization and archival sciences illustrates that accountability needs the reconstruction of the past. Hypothesis of this paper is that for the reconstruction of the past each organization needs a combination of threemechanisms: enterprise records management, organizational memory and records auditing. Enterprise records management ensures that records meet the quality requirements needed for accountability: integrity, authenticity, controllability and historicity. They ensure records that can be trusted and enhance the possibilities for the reconstruction of the past. The organizational memory ensures that trusted records are preserved for as long as is necessary to comply with accountability regulations. It provides an ICT infrastructure to (indefinitely) store those records and to keep them accessible. Records auditing researches the first two mentioned mechanisms to assess the possibility to reconstruct past organizational actions and transactions. These mechanisms ensure that organizations have a documented understanding of [1] the processing of actions and transactions within business processes; [2] the dissemination of trusted records; [3] the way the organization accounts for the actions and transactions within its business processes; and [4] the reconstruction of actions and transactions from business processes over time. This understanding is crucial for the reconstruction of the past and for organizational accountability.
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Corporate Social Responsibility affects Corporate Governance as it stretches the accountability of companies beyond its traditional boundaries. This however may conflict with the corporate objective of maximizing stockholder wealth. The paper provides an overview of various academic theories and corporate attitudes on this issue and discusses the merits and disadvantages of the two main governance modes: the stockholder mode and the stakeholder mode.
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full text via link Bij accountability denken we alsnel aan effectonderzoeken of een systematische methodiek die kwaliteit moet garanderen. Maar als je even doordenkt, dan kom je er al snel achter dat accountability misschien wel begint bij de houding en inzet van de individuele professional.
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Twee jaar geleden schreven Cloosterman & van Loo in TvM dat accountability bovenaan de lijst prijkt van kansen voor marketeer. De aandacht voor accountability is sindsdien alleen maar toegenomen. Vanwege de economische recessie ondervinden reclame- en communicatiebureaus meer en meer druk om de effectiviteit van hun campagnes, en daarmee hun bestaansrecht, aan te tonen.
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The Middle East and North Africa region has been absent form stocktaking exercises on social accountability initiatives (SAI), an umbrella term to designate citizen-led tools aimed at socio-political change. We argue that this sidelining is unwarranted, given the proliferation of participatory governance initiatives, civic associations and popular mobilisation in Arab societies after 2011. Whereas the struggle for improved accountability in the Arab world remains under-researched, analysis of authoritarian regime tactics has proliferated. The fact is, however, that many Arab societies have experimented with mechanisms to apply political pressure on corrupt elites while international donors have launched diverse SAIs, including community score cards and participatory and gender-responsive budgeting initiatives. In this chapter, we first identify this double gap: not only has the literature on SAIs overlooked the MENA region but scholarship on the Middle East has largely failed to recognise initiatives launched across the region over the past decade as SAIs. Then, we aim to address the blind spot of Arab SAI’s as pathways towards improved governance. Finally, we present an overview of extant literature and introduce a set of four research questions to better understand what social accountability means for people on the ground. These questions focus on the various meanings of social accountability (musā’ala vs muhāsaba), its modes of mobilisation, the responses from authorities to such initiatives and their overall outcomes.
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